Even if his allegedly invented words were entirely novel, I think it's unlikely people would have had issues understanding him. The same mechanisms (combining e

Even if his allegedly invented words were entirely novel, I think it's unlikely people would have had issues understanding him. The same mechanisms (combining extant prefixex, suffixex, roots into new combinations and onomatopoeias) are easily visible in slang today—just listen to hip-hop. Just this morning I heard "discriminize" instead of "discriminate" to fit a rhyme scheme. Is that really so different from creating "assassination" from "assassin"? But, it's a narrow interpretation of the results that this is novel. Etymologists have always been extremely skittish of assigning firm origins to words, much less calling Shakespeare an inventor of them himself. His demonstrated vocabulary is simply massive, and statistically some of the words are going to be early.